> Translation; Although we know damn well the difference between a laptop and a desktop, we’ve lied on surveys for years now for the purposes of marketing popularity.

There's no lie. Nobody is interested in how many desktop form factor computers run Linux vs how many laptops do. I doubt Microsoft breaks down the stats either for their desktop operating systems. And it's not as if the data is easily available, web browsers - by far the most common way to measure and extrapolate desktop numbers - do not report whether the underlying system is a desktop or laptop.

We're using "desktop" as shorthand but it's technically inaccurate, which goes back to my original point that the definitions are fuzzy but we kinda know what we mean and ultimately what number we're interested in.

Also just counting GNU/Linux on "desktop" form factor computers would probably show us getting 20-30% of the market, given the number of repurposed otherwise-obsolete desktop boxes being run as NASes/media servers, etc vs the number of laptops in the same role. If marketing were a factor, the GNU/Linux community would definitely be trumping our percentage of desktop form factor boxes...

Look very carefully and I'm seeing a pull-back from ChromeOS/Office 365 type models as people start to re-evaluate whether they want their files managed by third parties who increasingly demonstrate they don't have the power to provide the product they're advertising. When a United Nations official can have their own account shut down because the US government is run by a man not afraid to lash out in response to his own grudges (https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-email-block-a-wake-up-call-for-digital-sovereignty-10387383.html) it's a wake-up call that tells you maybe businesses - at minimum - should be managing their own core infrastructure.

I used to be happy encouraging people to use these tools, but Google was once relatively trustworthy, and there was no apparent reason to think Microsoft's bad behavior would extend beyond price rises, adding features people don't want and taking features away people do want, and file format shenanigans. I would not recommend anything like that any more. There are free open source self-hosted replacements for virtually everything right now that give you the same advantages as the cloud stuff with none of the disadvantages. And as entire governments move over to that (as they are), that's going to trickle down to normal users like you and I.

You made me look it up and... wow, 25%, give or take 10% depending on who's doing the measuring. That's an amazing step up for Mac OS X, and I wonder if the primary GNU/Linux desktop wasn't GNOME whether we'd have similar figures by now.

I can see that argument for Wayland. SystemD is merely a fixed sysvinit (albeit a little complicated so annoying to some - though annoyingly the same team have put out a shit load of shitty tools and added "systemd" to their names to do whatever they can to make the systemd "brand" unpopular, but systemd itself is what you'd expect to design if you wanted to autostart and stop daemons but include dependency checking) and Pipewire is just the replacement for PulseAudio, supporting more types of media.

I wouldn't say either are remotely like Windows, indeed I can't even think of what the Windows equivalent of Pipewire or PulseAudio would be.

(Arguably neither Pipewire nor PulseAudio should ever have existed, they were created because the kernel devs didn't understand audio and so a userland solution was created that... wasn't ideal for a whole bunch of reasons least of all the same spiky dev that's also helping make systemd unpopular. Wayland, quite literally, should not exist. It's a terrible idea.)

We've been (quite reasonably!) quietly counting laptops as desktops for the purposes of these types of survey so I suspect the definitions have always been fuzzy.

But that said, maybe we should be counting desktop GNU/Linux installs - ie installs where GNOME, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, etc are included in the primary installation and are used at least once, and the installation should include the GNU userland,. That's a little fuzzier though, how many desktops does GNU/Linux have these days?

Movies aren't usually filmed any more. And IIRC IMAX's digital format is a variant of 2K (a weird "two overlapping 2K images" thing), as opposed to mainstream cinema's 4 and 8K.

So, with that in mind, I think the conventional cinemas today have an edge on quality, even if not on screen size.

Steam has always had adult controls on it, and the existence of Family Mode with the ability for an account holder to set a PIN which, if not entered, will only show a subset of the games, suggests you're not talking about Steam at all.

I don't think it's anti-socialness that's stopping people from doing so, I think it's experience of getting pushy salespeople, rarely getting a straight answer, and feeling pissed that the price list isn't online somewhere.

Which is why, ultimately, I think this service is going to fail anyway. Because it'll experience the same thing that stops normal people from calling. There's no reason to suppose the AI will get a straight, honest, answer that isn't couched in "we'll discuss all the options when you get here" and so on.

Yeah, you're using it for the functions I described as it being OK with, and I said the $25 Home Backup plan had the data cap.

If it works for you, good for you! If you happen to need incoming connections of any kind, be it cameras, game servers, remote desktop, etc, it's a non-starter.

But yes, if your needs are light web browsing and streaming video, it's fine if less reliable than Comcast.

I'm not going to argue for and against the first part of your comment - all I can say is RAID controllers tend to be fussier than you're giving them credit for. Disks don't have to fully crash for there to be problems - If disk 1 in a RAID5 of 5 disks fails, and there's one sector that's unreadable on disk 3, that can be enough for many RAID controllers to crash out and mark the entire thing as unrecoverable. And... it's not necessarily a bad thing they do, as that does mean there's unrecoverable data and the file system no longer has integrity.

But, regardless, I'd say your final points are good and I agree 100% with them, especially on application level redundancy. That's the direction we should be going in, maybe even deprecating RAID at this point, not because it's inherently bad, but because it encourages practices that may inadvertently mean you have less redundancy than you think you have (if your applications are all reliant on the same hardware, are they really redundant? Unless everyone's buying in to the model, you can easily end up with that situation by accident) without adding much in the way of availability.

> Are you saying that because larger disks have higher probability of single-disk failure, or just because large disks increase reconstruction time, increasing the probability of another failure during reconstruction?

Yes ;-)

It's exactly the same issue that made us all switch from RAID5 to RAID6. The larger capacities increase the chances of failure, and the longer rebuild times (which are getting worse) are also likely to exacerbate that.

> If it's really true that the chances of more than two simultaneous disk failures is approaching one... these disks must be extremely unreliable.

Compared to 30 1Tb drives, not really. The problem is the probability per byte stored of it being misstored doesn't radically change as disk capacities increase. And the probability two drives will fail at the same time was always miscalculated by people putting together RAID sets in the early days - think MTBFs, and the fact builders are encouraged to use identical drives (which I understand, but I suspect is actually a bad idea over all, the focus needs to be on compatible drives, not identical drives), and it's always been higher than people expect.

The HDDs under discussion will come down in price, probably to under $200 within two years. They'll also drive down the prices of smaller disks. So basically you're looking at much cheaper back up media (who uses tape these days when you can hotswap a disk?)

A $600 SDD will eventually come down in price (in terms of price per terabyte) but you're looking at it taking years to even halve the price, as Moore's law doesn't apply any more. And it really is based upon general tech advancements, on foundries finding ways to reduce the size of transistors, as opposed to this where we all kinda know we're nowhere near the limit of what spinning rust can store, and the companies that still make HDDs know full well there are technologies from the 1980s (like this one! It's a variant of magnetic-optical, the same family of technologies that the Sony Minidisc used, and the NExT Cube before it) that haven't made it into standard disks yet because there's been little point.

Anyway, the point is hang in there, it'll happen, it's just expensive right now.

Also as usual I wrote GB when I meant TB throughout the above. Hopefully you all understood that...

Too early in the morning...

> the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one,

Was meant to read

> the chances of getting more than two disks fail simultaneously is approaching one

But as usual I didn't proof read...

Anyway, the point is the scenario RAID 6 was created to solve that RAID 5 couldn't (multiple disk failures) RAID 6 is going to be inadequate for in the near future. 30Tb drives is around 3X beyond the limit of RAID 6's usefulness.

At these capacities I wouldn't use RAIDs 5 or 6, or hypothetical RAID 7+ (ie others that use the matrixing type thing) anyway (partially for the same reason we stopped using RAID 5 after capacities went over a terabyte), RAID1 with three or more disks seems like a much more solid option.

At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

It's annoying because in some ways it undermines the point in having disks with these capacities in the first place. But... 8 10G disks in a RAID 6 configuration gives you 60Gb of usable capacity, as opposed to six 30Gb in a RAID 1 with three disks per set. So there's a saving in terms of power usage and hardware complexity, but it's not ideal.